#

"Right, we have a green light, gentlemen." Gerard announced to his colleagues gathered in the conference room. "And ladies." He added, nodding to the female agents among the crowed. He continued.

"As you all know, our late Head of Investigation, Chief Investigator Harold Schmidt, has died in a car accident. At the highest point and the steepest curve of the mountain path his onboard control malfunctioned and the vehicle went straight off the road, down the cliff. The exact timing and the location of the malfunction bother me, people."

A man raised his hand, and Gerard nodded him to speak up.

"Sir, I've done some data mining as you requested. The drive controller...this particular model has had only 0.4% malfunction rate over the past 5 years ever since it came out, and those were mostly attributed to the owners opting out of automatic OS upgrades, sir. "

"Good point." Gerard looked around the room. "Chief Investigator Schmidt had his car checked the day before his accident. This is where we start, people. Let's find out first if some stupid mechanic had made a mistake. Nevertheless, I want you to check on whoever handled Chief Investigator's car. His name, his address, his background, bank account, tax records, everything. I'm handling this personally. All report directly to me."

The meeting was done and Gerard headed back to his office. It wasn't as spacious as Jack's, but he liked it nevertheless. Gerard had not moved into the larger office allocated to the Head of Investigation. He wanted to close the case before making that room his.

As he sat himself down on the reclining chair, a message came through. It was marked confidential. Authenticating himself, Gerard opened the message to find a photo and personal profile of a young woman. She had short dark brown hairs, huge eyes, and the face of a girly school boy with freckles.

"Ah, you must be the Oxton girl." Gerard spoke to the expressionless face of the young pilot. One particular line of her profile caught Gerard's eyes.

Hobby / Interests : None

#

The man entered the mechanic shop and walked straight into the manager's office, trailing a young lady secretary who was complaining he can't just barge in like that. He showed her his identification and she shut up.

"Huh? What's this about?" The manager was rising from the chair behind his desk. The man showed him his free pass.

"An Overwatch agent?! What can I do for you?" The manager forced a friendly smile.

The Overwatch investigator flashed a car registration.

"I need to know who did what to this car."

"OK….let me see our files."

Couple minutes later, the manager fished out a record.

"OK...it came in pretty good shape. Mathias ran the standard check routine, exchanged the comlink module...and that's it." The manager shrugged, transferring the file over.

"You didn't touch the drive controller?" The investigator inquired.

"The record says nope."

"Can I talk to this Mathias person?"

The manager shook his head.

"Sorry, he quit right after this car. Funny though. He had just joined the day before."

The investigator raised his eyebrows, and the manager, good with reading moods, transferred the personnel file on the mysterious mechanic without saying any words. The investigator pointed at the comlink module's model number.

"Anything special about this comlink?"

The manager had a glance, then did a double take.

"That's odd…"

"What's odd?"

"It's not a stock model for this car." He turned to his secretary. "How the hell did this junk end up in our stock?"

The secretary shrugged, and the manager sighed. He turned to his terminal and fished out another record.

"Hm...It's not even on our stock list."

"Can you explain, please." The investigator asked nicely.

"We should not have this here. This comlink module has long been discontinued because of its security issues."

"Such as?"

"Any school kid can hack this piece of crap."

The investigator thanked him, and hurriedly left the shop.

#

The raid to Mathias Jansen residence resulted in nothing. The small rented flat was completely empty, except for an intruder detection device that was attached to the front door. By the time the Overwatch agents turned it off, the device had already sent off an alarm signal to its owner wherever the hell he was. A copy of the rent contract provided by the landlord showed that it had been signed just a week before the suspect joined the mechanic shop. The mechanic had paid the deposit and a month worth of rent in advance in cash.

"So he's gone, and now knows we are after him." Gerard summarised, leaning on the desk in the conference room.

"That is the case, sir." One of his investigators replied.

"And his records?"

The investigator shook his head.

"All forged, sir. At least, we do have his face from the cameras at the shop. Athena is running a global database scan, sir."

"Good. How long would it take?" Gerard inquired.

"Unfortunately, Athena is heavily engaged with the calculations for the Slipstream project, sir. We are low priority."

Gerard ran his hand over his face, suddenly feeling tired.

"The comlink. What's our progress on that one?" He asked.

"t was destroyed by the fire during the accident, but we know of its spec, sir. We got in contact with the airforce base nearest to the accident scene. They ran through the passive EM signal detection records to check the corresponding frequency, and found the bearing of the signal." The investigator pulled out a map on the big screen behind Gerard, and drew a long straight line from the airforce base.

"Somewhere along this line, sir, someone remotely hacked into Chief Investigator's car and messed up the drive controller at the right time." Then he drew another line crossing the first one. It was running from a small town west of the mountain pass.

"We are lucky there was an Army training maneuver around this town, and they had the electronic recon vehicle out, sir. We got another bearing for the signal, and…" He circled at the point where the two lines crossed. "This is where our motherfucker was at the time."

It was a small village about 2km north-east from the accident site.

"We got men moving in?" Gerard asked in a tone that he did not expect a no for an answer.

"Yes, sir."

Gerard checked the time. He was going to be late.

"Right, keep me posted. I have to go now." He stood up. "I've gotta pick up someone from the airport."

#

Commander Reyes was doodling when an encrypted message arrived. The decrypt process took him near a minute, but he was a patient man.

'They are on my trail.'

Gabriel sighed. He sent off a reply, also heavily encrypted. It read: 'Same time. Same place'. When the message was confirmed sent, he made sure there was no trace left in his device. When he was satisfied, he called for his secretary.

"Get McCree here, please."

-To be continued-